Foreword: This blog post arose out of a series of
conversations between the authors, which took place over several years (at
seemingly every Kalamazoo, NCS, or MLA we both happened to be attending). Mike
served as Book Review Editor for Arthuriana
from 2008–2011, when he passed the baton to Alex, who still holds this
position. Our experiences reading several reviews that bordered on mean-spirited
and unfair, and our guilt for having commissioned them, brought us to lament
the review process and to seek, over the course of these discussions, a better
way forward. And then, as our own monographs and edited collections appeared in
print and were subsequently reviewed, our desire for a more dynamic and
dialogic, to say nothing of generous, review process was felt all the more
acutely. What follows, then, is the result of our reflections on this process,
with a particular focus on the charge of anachronism—a charge that was leveled
recently at an essay Mike wrote, and one that is frequently used in what we
have found to be an undertheorized way in numerous reviews of scholarship on
the Middle Ages.

---

We are anxious
as hell about anachronism. And for good reason. The charge of anachronism is so
common and so promiscuously leveled in book reviews that just about any work of
historical scholarship is vulnerable to it. By anachronism, we don’t mean the creative
kind, such as Dante being quoted within the Arthurian age of the Wife of Bath’s Tale. We mean the sort
where reviewers accuse reviewees of the “mistaken” use of a modern term for a
medieval phenomenon or of making an “armchair” judgment about an ancient form
of xenophobia. It is, after all, the hallmark of the reviewer’s expertise to be
able to identify something out of joint and censure its presence as the result
of uninformed, amateurish, or shoddy research. And while we believe it can be
productive to question a scholar’s imprecise use of modern terminology to
characterize premodern behavior or concepts, the charge of anachronism is often
made in the name of indifferent moral evaluation. Rather than, for example, going
so far as to label medieval accusations of host desecration and well poisoning
as “antisemitic,” this modern condemnation of hate speech can be dismissed as
“unknowable” to medieval people like Chaucer, leaving him and his contemporaries
inculpable for their indulgence in this common fourteenth-century discourse.

At its core, this position of
indifference is situated within a well-studied philosophical debate about
making moral evaluations, particularly about cultures that are geographically
or temporally distant from us. As a well-known critic of moral relativism,
Bernard Williams qualifies his position in favor of making moral assessments to
account for what he calls a “relativism of distance,” in which moral appraisals
should not be made about the practices of ancient cultures operating within completely
different and temporally distinct moral paradigms. To emphasize what he feels
is the absurdity of such moral evaluations, he asks, “Must I think of myself as
visiting in judgement all the reaches of history? Of course, one can imagine
oneself as Kant at the court of King Arthur, disapproving of its injustices,
but exactly what grip does this get on one’s ethical or political thought?”[1]
These rhetorical questions are particularly compelling for those of us who work
in medieval studies, especially the audience for this blog, which has long
embraced such critical anachronisms in scholarly work, from postcolonial
critique to queer theory to posthumanist analyses. Yet, this hasn’t stopped
many of us from exclaiming “ANACHRONISTIC!” whenever we catch someone using “hacking”
to describe medieval textual appropriations or whenever we sniff out some feminist
critique of the misogyny of the “heroic ideal” of the Middle Ages. As readers
of this blog well know, scholars who pursue the latter are additionally accused
of being caught up in the dreaded “femfog” – a kind of anachronistic feminism
that has confused their judgment about pre-feminist medieval values.

We therefore want to examine two
kinds of charges of anachronism, which paradoxically view our scholarly
relationship to the Middle Ages from opposite angles. Both of these will
probably be familiar to most medievalists. The first rebukes scholars who fail
to imagine themselves in the Middle Ages, failing to constrain themselves to
only those terms and concepts of which Augustine and Boethius would approve. When faced with an act of compilation, we
better call it compilatio, and God
forbid we call it a remix. The second criticizes scholars for arrogantly
imagining themselves in the Middle Ages, condemning any medieval practices that
offend their modern scholarly sensibilities. We can’t be Kants in King Arthur’s court, making judgments about ancient
cultures that operated within different moral contexts. And while we
believe the ubiquity of these two charges of anachronism could be demonstrated
within many scholarly venues, including conference papers, articles, and
monographs, we want to call attention to their persistent presence within book
reviews. We have both served as book review editors and remain frequent
reviewers ourselves, so we are acutely sensitive to the difficult task of
reviewing books, which is often thankless, gut-wrenching, and uncompensated
work. Despite its low status and priority within our profession, we both
believe strongly in the importance of book reviews, particularly those that
engage with the arguments of books and offer challenging, which sometimes means
highly critical, assessments that continue the scholarly conversation at hand.
Yet, we have become discouraged by how often reviewers engage in dismissive
critiques of risk-taking books, too often tossing them into the dustbin of
“anachronistic” work. We think it’s in all of our best interests to stop doing
this.

To test our hunch about the
invocation of “anachronism” in book reviews, we set our sights on our favorite,
and arguably the most widely read, venue for reviews of monographs and edited
collections on medieval topics, The
Medieval Review (TMR). After reading through a number of recent reviews and
encountering “anachronism” and “anachronistic” as often as we suspected, we ran
a simple search on the journal website for all instances of “anachronis*,” which resulted in 241 hits. While many
instances of anachronism are not used
pejoratively – sometimes it is even used positively – its prevalence
nevertheless reveals the hold it has on many reviewers’ lexicons. Among the
numerous reviews we could discuss in this regard is Richard Raiswell’s review of Kathy Lavezzo’s book, Angels on the Edge of the World.
Raiswell offers a number of engaged critiques of Lavezzo’s book, but nearly all
of his objections constellate around the use of modern terminology and concepts
to describe medieval phenomena, in this case literary interpretations of mappae mundi. The danger of this
approach, he contends, “is to impose an exclusively post-Enlightenment reading
on them, and, by extension, to court anachronism.” While we think all
medievalists would agree that we should be as precise as possible in our
analysis of medieval practices, which often means distinguishing the premodern
from the modern, we also question our capacity or desire to vacate our own particular
historical moment. During what epoch exactly does Raiswell expect us to be reading these things? To read
it in the “now,” Raiswell seems to suggest, we are doing something invalid,
“court[ing] anachronism,” a charge he levels twice. Raiswell’s complaint seems
to be that anachronism per se is to be avoided, and that modern theoretical
constructs can only be applied to understanding the Middle Ages if the
constructs themselves would have been intelligible to people in the period.
This leaves little room for theory’s real work—unpacking a text’s tacitness and
gestures, while helping to elucidate what the text itself is unable, or
unwilling, to say. If we believe that Lavezzo fails to consider important
medieval contemporary contexts, then we should, of course, lodge that complaint,
but this critique in itself does not negate or undermine the significance of
using modern theories of the nation to enrich our understanding of the function
or interpretive work of medieval maps.

To browse other instances of
“anachronism” in TMR or other
journals that host reviews is to find
similar objections to scholarship that allegedly fails to repress its modernity.
Two recent books that have boldly thrown anachronistic caution to the wind are
Kathleen E. Kennedy’s Medieval Hackers
and E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots. In a review of both of these books in Medievally Speaking, Robin Wharton evaluates these
monographs on their own terms and then broaches the subject of anachronism in a
refreshingly productive and inquiring way: “[B]y deliberately embracing
anachronism in their terminology, Kennedy and Truitt more clearly announce the
immediate relevance of their projects beyond medieval studies. Further, the juxtaposition
enacted in both titles between modern technology and the qualifier ‘medieval’
insists on difference, even as it leverages analogy. I did often question
whether the implicit analogy between pre-modern and postmodern ‘hackers’ or
‘robots’ or ‘automatons’ was actually useful. To prompt such a reaction,
however, may have been precisely what Kennedy and Truitt intended.” Rather than
simply dismiss these books as irredeemably anachronistic, Wharton offers a
challenge to the reader, one that asks us to grapple carefully with the
relationship between current practices and terminology and those of the distant
past. Some of us may indeed end up deciding that some of these terms dilute or
collapse important distinctions between the medieval and modern, but do we
really want to use anachronism per se as a litmus test for evaluating
scholarship? Is it even possible to avoid anachronism in our work? Or do we
want medieval studies to recognize anachronism as a necessary, and often even a
productive, element of our investigations of the past?

While we are discouraged by how
often we encounter objections to terminological anachronism, we are more
disturbed by the second objection to anachronism, which condemns, ipso facto, moral
evaluations of medieval practices. For an example of this, we turn to a critical
response to a recent essay of Mike’s, “Constantinian
Christianity in the London Manuscript: The Codicological and Linguistic
Evidence of Thornton’s Intentions,” which appeared in a volume he co-edited
with Susanna Fein, Robert Thornton and His Books: New Essays
on the London and Lincoln Manuscripts (York Medieval Press, 2014). The vast majority of Mike’s
essay consists of a linguistic analysis of the opening texts in the London
Thornton Manuscript (London, British Library MS Additional 31042), which opens
with selections of the life of Christ from Cursor
mundi, which is followed by the Northern Passion, which details Christ’s crucifixion. Thornton then copied The Siege of Jerusalem, which details
the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, painting this event as the Jews getting
their comeuppance for having killed Christ. And then, finally, Thornton included
two Charlemagne romances (around which he placed two short religious lyrics),
in which the Muslims are defeated like their Jewish forebears had been. At even
a cursory glance, it is clear that Thornton’s series of texts narrates a
Christian historiography founded on the subjugation of the non-Christian Other.
In his essay, Mike sought to ferret out, using the dialect layers of each text,
how many different exemplars lay behind this series, and thus how much
responsibility Robert Thornton had, as the manuscript’s compiler, for
actualizing this particular literary sequence.

It turns out, Thornton was largely
responsible for this sequence, and this struck Mike as significant, not only in
terms of codicology and the history of the book, but also as a noteworthy
example of a flesh-and-blood fifteenth-century English reader whose
Christianity and historiography were predicated on supersession. So, as a
parting shot in the essay, Mike cited Cornel West’s admittedly potted history
of Christianity from Democracy Matters,
in which West sees the Church, after Constantine marries it to the State, as
being complicit in a host of oppressive and reactionary measures against
various minorities. In this vision of salvation history, Rome neutered Christ’s
radical egalitarianism, turning religion into just another institutional arm of
the state. Mike cited only West in this regard, but it is worth noting that West
did not coin the phrase “Constantian Christianity,” nor is he alone among
modern scholars in using this as a heuristic. Such august theologians as John
Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas (the latter arguably the most influential
theologian of the last fifty years) have gotten great mileage out of it. In our
neck of the woods, it underpins much of the scholarship of David Aers. So it
did not strike Mike as particularly controversial or outlandish to use this
category as a way to frame Thornton’s efforts to create a particularly
anti-Jewish and -Muslim historiography.

But one reviewer did not see it this
way, remarking that

Upset by Thorton’s anti-Semitic polemics,
Johnston comes to the awkward and anachronistic conclusion that “Thornton
crafted his own unique combination of texts, one that speaks to the very worst
impulses of medieval Christianity: the denigration of the non-Christian Other”
(199). Johnston admires Thornton’s efforts, but at the same time calls his
output a “morally retrograde product” (200). The absurdity of transferring our
own moral values and our own concept of tolerance onto medieval individuals
culminates in Johnston citing Cornel West’s complaint of what “Constantian
Christianity” did to “women, people of colour, and gays and lesbians” (ibid.).
It is really a pity that Johnston’s deserving investigation of Thornton’s
editorial and scribal achievements results in such an arrogant and
anachronistic assessment of Thornton’s personality.[2]

In
the space of a few sentences, the charge of anachronism pops up twice, and we
see this particular review as a perfect crystallization of what we are here identifying
as the second form of anachronism, one that rejects the very idea of standing
in ethical relationship to the past. The reviewer contends that it is anachronistic
for Mike to have labeled Thornton’s anti-Jewish and -Muslim sequence as
representing the worst parts of medieval Christianity. But surely, medieval Christianity
had a virulent strain of anti-Judaism, and surely we find this repugnant. This
is not to say, of course, that medieval Christianity, any more or less than the
Christianity of today, was doctrinally, liturgically or intellectually monolithic.
But surely it is well within the scholar’s remit to note when a historical
figure went out of his way to draw liberally from the available well of
anti-Semitic thought.

Such sentiments as this reviewer
expressed would effectively erect a barrier between past and present,
forbidding any sort of reflection on how our morality has developed over time.
This is not a scholarly practice we would endorse, and it’s not the world of
scholarship we would like to live in. But more to the point, we think such
attitudes to historical judgment are undertheorized and unreflective. There is,
after all, a large body of philosophical literature on this question, most of
which has met with a resounding silence among medievalists at large, but
particularly those among us who throw down the gauntlet of anachronism.[3]
And while space prohibits an extensive lit review, it is worth drawing
attention to a few major voices in the philosophical debates about the
justification of passing moral judgments on the past. No less than Hegel
wrestled with this question, insisting that while ethical systems of the past
can be valid for their time, it is a separate matter altogether as to whether
they are rational. Opening up a space between a past action’s validity and its
rationality places a large burden on the moral judgment of the philosopher
commenting on an ethical system’s rationality.[4]
In a different but related vein, Miranda Fricker concedes that we cannot morally
evaluate the actions of individuals who lived under entirely different systems
of thought. But in place of the sorts of moral agnosticism towards the past
that we find subtending most book reviews in medieval studies, Fricker proposes
“a kind of critical judgement I call moral-epistemic disappointment.
This style of critical judgement is appropriately directed at an individual
agent whose behaviour we regard as morally lacking, but who was not in a
historical or cultural position to think the requisite moral thought—it was
outside the routine moral thinking of their day.”[5]
Fricker’s suggestion offers a sort of middle-ground, one that respects the fact
that ideology provides limits to what is thinkable, while simultaneously
allowing us to register discontent with those who failed to see beyond the
limitations of their day. Both Peter Singer and Steven Pinker ground notions of
moral progress in evolutionary psychology. For Singer, the history of human
evolution has been one of an ever-widening circle of concern, from kin altruism
to group altruism all the way to today’s standard of universal human rights.
One of the effects of the evolution of reason within human societies is the
development of a moral sense, particularly putting the concerns of others on an
equal footing to our own.[6]
Likewise Pinker argues that violence has declined precipitously across human
history, thanks to a combination of the still-evolving moral capacity within
the very structures of our brains, alongside the development of human
institutions (e.g., government, democracy) that facilitate cooperation.[7]
Both Singer and Pinker unapologetically contend that humans have become morally
superior as history has progressed.

We offer this brief foray into moral
philosophy and evolutionary psychology not as an endorsement of any of these
positions, but rather to underscore that the question of how we ought to view
the past is more complex than reductive charges of anachronism would admit. How
to judge the past has been a live question in philosophy for a number of years,
and we in the world of literary studies would be well served to listen to their
debates. But perhaps we medievalists didn’t need to look so far outside our
discipline, for one of the gems of medievalism, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,
has been underscoring the message for us since 1889. Most of us will no doubt
know the story well, but the point we wish to raise here is simply that Hank
Morgan recognizes the absurdity of a good deal of medieval life, and he points
it out to great comic effect. He is not afraid to engage in the sorts of moral
evaluations of the past that many critics today would find anachronistic. But
Twain never lets us forget the opposite side of that coin, for Hank’s own
blindnesses and unthinking cultural chauvinism remind readers that 1880s
America was in need of moral evaluation, as well. And perhaps a fear that we
have our own moral blindspots and are thus in no position to be standing in
judgment of other times and places is why, in the end, we cry “anachronism”
when we encounter scholarship making evaluative claims. But perhaps the final
lesson ought to come from Twain, who would license us to comment on the moral
systems of the past, provided we remain open to an entirely different set of
moral failings of the present. Both are necessary, and Twain would wince at the
thought that we must remain silent about the ethical ideals of the past. As
critics who engage with cultures of the past, we remain convinced that we are
justified in labeling anti-Semitism, or misogyny, or whatnot, when we see it.

A
WAY FORWARD: A PROPOSED SOLUTION

In conclusion, we are not going to
be so bold as to offer a new scholarly methodology as a buttress against often
reflexive charges of anachronism in reviews. Instead, we wish to close with
some reflections on the process of reviewing in general, which we hope might
remedy our current critical moment. In this moment, it is all too often that the
charge of anachronism emerges when theoretically inclined work ends up in the
hands of a less theoretically inclined reviewer. The less theoretically
inclined reviewer ends with the final word, and we as scholars read far more
reviews than actual books—using, that is, reviews to help us decide in which
books we should invest our time and expendable income. We believe that, were
the review process to be fixed (and it is currently broken, in our humble
opinions), we could create a space for actual dialogue about the ideas in
scholarship. Such a dialogue would, for example, allow scholars like Lavezzo,
Kennedy and Truitt to engage their critics in a dialogue about anachronism. And
it would, of course, allow all scholars to engage with critiques of any sort
that might be leveled against their work. We believe that charges of
anachronism, so often reflexive and undertheorized, have proliferated and
become the fabric of reviews because the review process largely does not allow
for such allegations to be challenged. As book review editors, we have
published reviews that we thought merited responses, and as regular readers of
book reviews, we have encountered reviews that we considered to be unfair, but
the current format of most journals does not provide a forum for such a dialogue.

After the publication of a particularly
mean-spirited and dismissive review of his book Translating Troy, Alex wrote to the journal’s book review editors
to request the opportunity to respond. The editors refused, offering no other
justification for their refusal other than “the journal has never published a
response to a review in its entire history.” Alex explained that the review
contained obvious mischaracterizations of the contents of his book, but to no
avail. The very fact that the journal had never allowed for it in the eighty-plus
years of its existence was reason enough. Mike, happily, reports a more
positive experience, one that, we believe, points the way forward towards a
more dynamic and positive engagement between reviewer and reviewee, and offers
the chance for a more fruitful dialogue about the nature of anachronism. In Mike’s case, “Reviews in History,” an online review venue published under the auspices of the Institute of Historical Research, commissioned a review of his Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England. In their review process, the editor of the journal sends a
pre-publication copy of the review to the author, offering him/her a chance to
write a response. Both are then published simultaneously on the site. What
results is no longer the standard monologic, authoritative diktat of the
reviewer, who issues forth his/her judgment in isolation, forcing the reader to
rely on the auctoritas of the
reviewer in abstraction. When the author can respond to the review, a
dialogue—incipient and abortive, to be sure, but a dialogue nonetheless—begins
to emerge.

What would happen, we wonder, if the
book review process were opened up to include more than just one reviewer’s
voice? We believe efforts like “Reviews in History” are steps in the right
direction, but we think more could be done. After all, many author-responses
come off as sour grapes, and journals usually allow such responses on an ad hoc
basis, typically when passions within a review have run high or the review was
particularly salacious. More important than the author’s reply, we feel, is
response from the larger scholarly community invested in the work. This
commitment to including the voices of all invested readers, after all, is
consistent with calls for opening up peer review more generally, a topic that Alex has addressed in a recent essay in InsideHigherEd.com. Most print journals would not be able
to accommodate the sprawling format of multiple reviews and responses, but we
can imagine open online formats, in which multiple reviewers could offer
opinions of the book, either though annotations on open access works or through
separately published reviews that would be open to commentary and response.
Such a forum could also release the pressure placed on individual reviewers,
distributing the responsibility to a larger number of readers. And given the
current gift economy of the reviewing business, we believe such formats could
relieve, rather than increase, the current burden for reviewers.

Perhaps we have failed to convict
some of our readers that charges of anachronism in reviews shut down
conversation precisely where it should be opened up. If that’s the case, we
remain confident that a different bugbear has become problematic in the world
of reviews as you see it. In other words, insert your pet peeve about reviews
here, and it, too, could likely be disappeared by allowing multiple
voices—including the original author’s—into the review process. Thus, it
remains our hope that many, if not most, of us want to take part in a
conversation about how to improve the post-publication review process. No
matter what we do, we would urge all of us to recognize that we are working
both within and without the Middle Ages, to embrace the delicate dance of
historical scholarship, and to consider more carefully the inherent role of
anachronism in our work.

Michael Johnston is an Associate
Professor of English at Purdue University.

Alex Mueller is an Associate
Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

[1] Bernard Williams, “Human Rights and
Relativism,” in In the Beginning Was the
Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 62-74, at 62.

[2] Ulrike Schenk, Review of Susanna Fein
and Michael Johnston, eds., Robert
Thornton and His Books, in Anglia
134.1 (2016): 162–67, at 165–66.

[3] One recent exception to what we here
term a resounding silence is James Simpson’s very recent and very provocative,
“Not Yet: Chaucer and Anagogy,” Studies
in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 31–54. Here, Simpson proposes that we widen
our sense of historicism to include not only the synchronic moment of authorship
and publication, but also what Simpson terms diachronic historicism, looking at
how texts are actualized in future historical unfoldings.

[5] Miranda Fricker and Michael Brady, “The
Relativism of Blame,” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (2010): 151–77. Note that,
although this essay is co-written, the part from which we here draw is authored
solely by Fricker.

13 comments:

I wrote, and erased, a longer comment, which nobody but me needed to read, but I wanted to make sure I registered my thanks to you both for sharing this thoughtful and well-framed piece. It has given me a lot to think about.

@Unknown: I'm glad that you found this informative and productive. I am pleased that we could share this piece here, and I do hope the medievalist/academic community will think more creatively about both the substance and the format of book reviews in the future.

H-france forum seems to offer something a little like the online form you're envisioning, in which they commission a cluster of reviews of a book and a response by the author. I'm not sure how open the format is to wider reader discussion, but it does give a more dialogic and varied mode of reviewing, while incorporating author response as a regular feature rather than an occasional recourse in particularly controversial instances allows for a less heated and more thoughtful atmosphere.

I'm not a French historian and know about this only because my brother's book was recently discussed there, so I'm not well informed of the details. But here is a link for anyone who wants to check it out: http://www.h-france.net/forum/forumlist.html.

Thanks so much, Unknown, Jonathan, and Sylvia, for your enthusiastic responses here. And Sylvia, I am delighted to hear about the H-france forum. It seems to me that even opening up the possibilities of response to more than one reviewer would deeply enrich the process and its broader significance.

Excellent piece! Thanks to you both for framing the issues so clearly and so urgently. Thanks, too, for proposing such a workable, pragmatic solution. Best essay I've read in some time!! (Definitely made my intellectual week, so to speak).

Whoops, the above is me (somehow my name didn't show up)! I should say, though: one of the ideas we had when we started *postmedieval* FORUM was to provide just such a venue for multiple reviews. You wouldn't believe how many people don't want to get into mixing it up over a book. We quickly shifted to commissioned short papers on current topics that might bear on topics perceive as controversial. That didn't provoke much, either. So, as much as I like the idea, it is hard to get a group of people together to debate in public. I do hope someone takes up your idea, though, and that people keep trying new approaches. Your idea remains great!! Holly Crocker

Thanks so much, everyone, for these enthusiastic responses! I had posted an earlier comment expressing my thanks, but for some reason it didn't come through. Here's the gist:

Sylvia: I wasn't aware of the H-France forum and am delighted to know about it now! Commissioning a cluster of reviews sounds like an excellent way to challenge the authority of the single review and push towards a more comprehensive model. My only concern here is that multiple full-length reviews may increase, rather than decrease, the reviewing workload.

Holly: You are too kind! I adore the postmedieval FORUM and am fascinated to learn about its reviewing roots. It's helpful to know too that you experienced such resistance to the dialogic/debate model. It's not altogether surprising to me that people responded this way, even with the new format, but I do naively wish we could find a way to encourage venues for healthy, perhaps even conversational, critique. I have always felt that critique can be one of the most generous responses we can offer to a work, especially because it demonstrates investment. Critique can of course just be downright mean, but I don't think most of us use it in that way. Lastly, I should mention that one of my main frustrations as a book review editor is securing appropriate reviewers, so I've wondered if a more open format might attract more interested (and more expert) reviewers and lessen the pressure on one reviewer to solely provide an authoritative review (which can be a daunting and thankless task).

It occurs to me to wonder about the charge of "medievalism," which can often be used pejoratively as the obverse of "anachronism." At the start of every semester, I encourage my students to read the introductory essay that C. S. Lewis wrote for a translation of Athanasius' On the Incarnation, which explained his reasoning for "why we read old books." He notes, as you note in relation to Twain, that just as much as past generations had their own moral blindnesses that seem sickeningly obvious to us, so we too probably have moral blindnesses that will be sickeningly obvious to those beyond our own historical circumstances. He suggests that the past may have just a good a handle on those blindnesses as the future, with the added benefit of being available.

If the present offers us moral perspective on the failings of the past, can the past offer us moral perspective on the failing of the present? If we can find ways to express our moral disapproval of past barbarisms, can the past find a way to express its disgust at ours?

You make a nice point about medievalism, Nathaniel, which certainly attends to the complexities of the many forms of anachronism. As for your provocative question about the past expressing disgust about the present, I guess I'd like to believe that humanistic historical investigation is one way we might "access" the past's perspective on the future. We engage with "old" texts to hear them speak to us now and consider carefully what answers they might offer for our current questions. I'm working on a project now that considers the way the medieval textual practices, such as compilation and commentary, might help us understand the nuances and futures of digital practices, such as wikis and social annotation platforms. In this way, I see the past as speaking to the future - maybe not expressing disgust - but speaking to us nonetheless.

Thanks, Alex & Mike, for this important article, which is so pertinent to my own work on 15th-century chivalric literature and aristocratic ideology! Two thoughts, one for each of the forms of anachronism. First, while we might, in exploring the past, avoid using a specific (perhaps trendy) contemporary _term_, we cannot avoid using _our language_ and the discourses that it enables and constrains; put in other ways, to speak without any "anachronism" whatsoever about, say, Chaucer, would be to use (and think within) Middle English. (Absurd.) Second, regarding what is aptly called "indifferent moral evaluation" I might recommend a bit of Marxism, enough, that is, to make class and division of labor a central component. There can be no "routine moral thinking" in a rigid hierarchy of castes. Moreover, to pose as an agnostic on, say, the brutality and coercion of chivalric militarism is to refuse to imagine and/or reconstruct the real moral understanding of all sorts of victims who had little access to the (limited) historical record upon which we rely.

Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Carl. I've often been baffled by how strenuously some scholars resist the use of modern terminology, particularly because a hard-line form of this resistance can lead to absurd arguments about what makes our language premodern enough. Marxism has provided helpful concepts and an accompanying lexicon for understanding pre-Marxist phenomena. We may say, of course, that medieval people had no conception of Marx's understanding of class, but that doesn't necessarily eliminate the usefulness of a class-based analysis of a particular medieval practice. If there is a better medieval term, for example, then I would prefer it, but as you say, these terms only come to us from the historical record, which does not represent all medieval people, especially the disenfranchised.

And of course that takes us right back to the semantic "anachronism" debate with which we began! On what peasants did or didn't think, I must claim some agnosticism. Sure, 14th-century peasants could not be "Marxists," but we might reevaluate the propriety of applying Marx here by thinking along the lines that you ascribe to Simpson's “diachronic historicism," which explores "how texts are actualized in future historical unfoldings.” Is it not possible that a history of "class-conscious" struggle has been a constitutive feature of contemporary Marxism, where much that is fundamental was anticipated and actually formulated by, e.g., John Ball: “From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men.” Since _refinement_ of methodology (in Marx, Engels, et al.) can be distinguished from its _origination_, rather than assert that John Ball was a Marxist, we might (half-seriously) consider Marx a "Ballite."

I agree that Simpson's formulation is very useful for understanding the complexity of engaging with the past, particularly as we think about ideologies such as Marxism, which are far from monolithic and probably more "Ballist" (hehe!) than we might be willing to admit.